How to think, not what to think

By Jon Turney

LEARNING science means learning how to think like a scientist. Along with the facts, theories and techniques of your subject you also acquire habits of mind, ways of arguing and standards for evaluating data. The path to a degree is an initiation into a particular style of thought.

You won’t get much chance to reflect on this during a science course. The people who run it are constantly struggling to fit in what they regard as the essentials of an ever-expanding field. The exams they set will focus on the facts.

Yet it is the intellectual style you also learn that will stay with you long after the details of a subject are lost. So you probably owe it to yourself to pursue some of the larger questions. What other styles might there be? What is it like to use them? How do denizens of other scientific tribes and territories see the world?

The search is on, then, for the one book – not too long, not too dense – which might start you off. Passing by any number of weightier tomes on the philosophy of science, could it be John Ziman’s Reliable Knowledge? This is still a good place to discover some of the things the sciences have in common. Ziman did enough good physics to earn him a fellowship of the Royal Society, but what he will be best remembered for is a string of elegant books on the logic and lore of science. This one, first published in 1978, is now available in Cambridge’s Canto paperback series. It is a very readable introduction to …

To continue reading this premium article, subscribe for unlimited access.